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Intergender Friendship

Women have boyfriends and girlfriends. If you’re not fucking her, you’re her girlfriend.

Ever since “When Harry Met Sally” was released there’s been a constant droning about the validity of intergender friendships. To even suggest that men and women couldn’t be strictly platonic, mature friends is to invite reproach from a society that’s been steeped in notions of egalitarian equalism. If men and women are fundamentally “the same” there should be no impediment to developing and maintaining a friendship in like terms to a same sex friendship.

First off, men and women cannot be friends in the way or to the degree that most people perceive same sex friendship to be. Now the natural resoponse to this is “I have lots of female friends” or “what are you trying to say, I can’t have female friends, they all haffta be enemies?” Which of course is the standard binary (black or white, all or nothing) retort and the trained AFC thinks anyone suggesting that men and women’s relations as friends could be anything less than equitable and fulfilling is just a neanderthal chauvinist thinking. However, they are incorrect – not because you wouldn’t want to actually be a woman’s friend. There are fundamental differences in the ways men and women view friendship within the framework of their own sex and the ways this transfers to the concept of intergender-friendship.

Quite simply there are limitations on the degree to which a friendship can develop between men and women. The easy illustration of this is that at some point your female “friend” will become intimately involved with another male; at which point the quality of what you perceived as a legitimate friendship will decay. It must decay for her intimate relationship to mature. For instance, I’ve been married for 15 years now; were I to entertain a deep friendship with another female (particularly an attractive female) other than my wife, my interest in this woman automatically becomes suspect of infidelity – and of course the same holds true for women with man-friends. This dynamic simply doesn’t exist for same sex friendships because the sexual aspect is inconsequential.

I understand how stupidly obvious this seems, but remember we’re qualifying the characteristics of intergender friendships in the face of a social undercurrent that wants to convince us that men and women are fundamentally equal. According to this precept, men should essentially possess the capacity to repress their sexual impulse to the point that it should have no bearing on his rational decision to engage in a platonic friendship. Likewise, a woman should be able to dissociate herself from her hypergamous nature to pursue a completely asexual friendship. And both genders should maturely pursue the friendship for their mutual enrichment, however, reality tells a different story.

Girl-Friends

All of this isn’t to say that you cannot have female acquaintances, or that you must necessarily be rude or ignore all women with contempt (that is binary thinking once again), but it is to say that the degree of friendship that you can experience with women (as a man) in comparison to same sex friendships will always be limited due to sexual differences. Most men will only ever engage in friendships with women that they initially find attractive which then, of course, is colored by their attraction to that woman. Now I’m sure the “not in my case” card will get played and attempt to make the anecdotal case for how much an exception to the rule you are, to which I’ll say, even if you legitimately are, it makes no difference. Because the very nature of an intergender friendship is ALWAYS going to be limited by sexual differences. Even if you can legitimately make the case that you aren’t now, or weren’t in the past, attracted to your opposite sex friend, your other intimate relationships will still modify and/or limit the depth of that friendship.

Even the best, most asexual, platonic, male-female friendships will be subject to mitigation based on sex. The easy example is; I’m sure you’d be jealous and suspect of your girlfriend were she to be spending any “quality time” with another ‘male-friend’. It’s simply time spent with another male who isn’t you and you’ll always question her desire to do so in favor of spending time with you.

Bear in mind that it’s also important to consider how women relate with their same-sex friends as a template for their intergender friendships. Remember each sex uses its same-sex model of friendship on which to base their understandings and expectations for an opposite sex friendship. Very few men have the patience to sort out how women interact with their women friends, so they opt for the easy answer that equalism gives them – we’re all the same, so your buddies are the same as women. Any guy that’s been in the circular hell of being a woman’s “phone-friend” knows this isn’t true. Girl-friends have a much different dynamic for friendship than do men, but likewise, and by way of her innate solipsism, she’s presuming her intersexual friendships will follow along a similar template to that of her girl-friends.

And why wouldn’t women expect their male friends to conform to their template for friendship? In a feminine-centric world it makes practical sense for men to realign themselves to women’s friendship frame. Men will all too readily tolerate behavior and attitudes from girl-friends that they’d come to physical blows were their male friends to do the same. Since the prerogative of maintaining that friendship is, by default, cast in a feminine-centric frame, women (generally) wouldn’t even think of altering their own interpretations of friendship to accommodate a male perspective.

Get it out of your head now that you’re even in a so called “friend zone” with any woman. There is no friend zone – there is only the limbo between you being fooled that a girl is actually a friend on an equitable level to your same sex friends, and you understanding that as soon as she becomes intimate with another guy your attentions will become a liability to any relationship she might want to have with the new sexual interest and she puts you off, or you do the same when you become so involved with another girl.

The Female Wingman

A lot of guys cling to this mistaken notion that they can parlay a female friendship into action with one of her hot friends. You may even have legitimate examples where that might’ve happened, but for each one, I’ll show you a girl who would’ve fucked you irrespective of whether or not you had a mutual female friend to vouch for you. That friendship may have been a convenient pivot into another hot girl, but it wasn’t the prior intergender – friendship that got you laid; it was that the girl who banged you found you attractive enough to fuck.

I’m not denying the utility of ‘Social Circle Game’, nor am I ignoring that the conspicuous attention of hot women is good social proof – that’s not what the friend pivot is about. It’s about assuming a girl-friend will endorse you as a preselected, potential sexual partner.

You may think it’s great social proof to have some hot friend endorse you as a good lay for her other friends, but women talk. In fact it’s all they do most of the time. Your status as a friend gets transferred to her girlfriends. Why? First, if she was a prior target for you who turned into a LJBF, you already have that as an association of your friendship. Any of her girlfriends that would subsequently date you will know that she was your primary interest initially – not them. Secondly, assuming you even could have a completely innocuous, asexual, platonic beginning to your inter-gender friendship, there will be competition anxiety with the other girlfriends. This will result in a tendency for the original friend to filter your exposure to which of her girlfriends she finds the least threatening. You have to consider the balance between your value to her as another friend / orbiter against her endorsing you as a potential intimate for one of her girlfriends. Just because you have a girl-friend with a social circle of attractive female friends doesn’t mean you’ll get her endorsement for the one you’d prefer to get with.

To complete the circle here, all of this leads up to understanding that your female friend will NEVER be one of your guy friends. This silly notion is founded on the expectation that your female friend will hold the same interests and have the same reactions that your male friends will. Women are never going to be your wingman. One of the great downfalls of men today is too much female influence in their lives, to the point that it’s become stigma. Beware the guy with too many or exclusively female friends. This might make for the plot of stupid movies, but most women are wary of guys with so many female friends that they question their being able to relate with and be Men.

I have female fans galore, but only 2 female friends. I’ve slept with both in my younger days.

Both have aged VERY well, but I am just not attracted to them sexually. I don’t see them often, but when I do, the social proof of having two vivacious and extremely attractive women doting on me always gets attention of random women.

When I meet women, they can either be a fan, or they can be in my bed, or they can be my customer. That’s the end of the story.

On the other hand, I have plenty of exes who I appreciate and like having in my life, but I generally only see them in groups (my choice) or with their significant other (also my choice). It’s good for ongoing social proof with current women because they see how much my exes still love and appreciate me, plus it’s good for couples outings (hunting, horseback riding, paddleboarding, boating, camping, skiing, etc).

The general premise behind the “if you aren’t fucking her you are her girlfriend” meme is sound if you are an uninitiated chump, but for guys who know the score having a few of the right kind of female friends in your life is like having a flock of geese that lay golden eggs; it can provide you with a constant source of new pussy and a few fun drinking buddies.

I had friendships with two of these kinds of girls over the past couple of years. You met one of them. DEFINITELY not dating material, but very useful for the social aspect of the relationship and the side perk of having almost every one of her friends want to take a turn at fucking me. She did cock block me on one occasion but you would be amazed at what some women are willing to do when they want to fuck. Ended up scoring two out of that group before it fell apart and I’m sure it would have been more if we were still in contact.

The other one is a late 20’s chick who I messed around with in the past while (unbeknownst to me at the time) she was hooking up with a friend of mine. That worked out well because it created a dynamic with us that allowed me to hook up with her friend. She flipped me off as she stormed out of my place leaving her 20 year old best friend with me in my jacuzzi, but from that point on everything was totally cool between us and my status amongst her and her friends was sealed.

Through her I also ended up dating the hottest chick I’ve ever banged, and there are no signs of that well running dry anytime soon. I went to a fundraiser last week that was put on by another girl in her group. and despite the fact that I have been out of the social circuit for quite awhile I am still “the man” with her entire group.

Actually, now that I am getting back in the groove socially I wouldn’t mind finding another one of these kinds of women to keep around. I don’t actively seek it out but when I spot the right opportunity I know from experience how best to handle it to leverage the situation for my benefit. It takes a few years to perfect the art of getting and keeping these women in just the right spot to allow you to benefit from the social proof without getting cockblocked at every turn, but the end result is a steady stream of “fill in” women that require very little effort to game. And I’m all about that.

I should also note that over the past few years I have paid VERY close attention to the dynamic between platonic male/female relationships and one thing I have noticed is that for a woman to want to spend time with a man in ANY capacity it ALWAYS has to benefit her in one way or another. If she is hanging out with you it isn’t because she enjoys your company. Well, maybe she does, but that is merely an incidental benefit. In order for a woman to want to be “friends” with you she is either sexually attracted to you on some level or she keeps you around for attention and validation. Other than that you might as well be dead to her.

Something happened to me a couple of years ago that really drove this point home. I was dating a chick and her less attractive friend was absolutely infatuated with my business partner. The friend was a really nice girl and we all had a good time together, but I eventually realized that if it weren’t for her interest in him, I might as well be dead to her. She always talked about how much she loved “us” but when it came down to it, when he wasn’t around her actions didn’t show this. She was only “good friends” with me because she wanted to get with him.

The women who want you around for attention and validation are worse than useless. But women who are in the other group, even if you aren’t sexing them, as long as they see you in a sexual light you can parlay that into a positive net result for you.

I am not sure if you covered it in previous blog entries (and it may be a different topic all together) but the danger of being her surrogate boyfriend role (as opposed of trying to be “platonic” with her) will backfire. One of your eye opening posts on sosuave that will hit home to many men that included myself was this one:

“You’re no Cap’n-Save-Ho – that would imply you’re expecting sex in return for solving her problems (i.e. a Savior Schema). You are however, her surrogate boyfriend; all the responsibilities and emotional expectations of a BF with a mutual understanding that that sex will never be reciprocated for it. You meet her emotional needs and the LDR boyfriend takes care of her sexual needs (among which I might add is a need to make amatuer porn with him,..heh). So, you take care of her head and he’ll take care of her twhat, sound like a good deal for you?””

But then I have females who give me major IOI’s, know I’m seeing someone and still make time to meet up. There is tension, sexual tension.

The giveaway is that they never bring up the girl i’m seeing or if they do, do so in a very suggestive way like “oh, your girlfriend would kill me if…”

That demonstrates that they see this meet up, although currently platonic as having the potential for escalation—otherwise what’s with the comments?

Another girl says/writes things like “A game, a dream” in response to public facebook postings alluding to an “attraction” to some guy—which is actually me.

Rollo has written about the power of fantasy.

If you kill the attraction, then yah, you’re in the girl-friend zone….

If you have a “platonic” relationship based on sexual tension, then you can fuel the fantasy.

Understanding game, attraction, the power of being aloof…short messages, vague texts are odd hours….all that is stoking the flames of fantasy and desire in your female “friends” who have given you IOI’s.

I am a firm believer in the idea that a man who “dates like a woman” is a man who is swimming in pussy. Women have orbiters. Men can have them too. The difference is that all of the orbiters in the world won’t increase a woman’s sexual market value, but for a man who has female orbiters it can and will increase his value exponentially. Rock stars don’t get laid because chicks like their music, they get laid because preselection is the most powerful attraction trigger there is, by far.

The key is that there MUST be sexual tension, as walawala mentioned. It won’t work any other way. A man can learn the art of controlling the emotions of his orbiters and channel the sexual energy into sex (or relationships) with multiple women in and outside of that woman’s social group. It’s not easy. The hardest part is creating the right dynamic with the orbiter that allows you access to other girls.The key to this is to allow the sexual energy to flow while establishing your “free agency”. Easier said than done but it is possible.

With the first chick I mentioned in my earlier post I firmly established this by fucking her best friend. It was a risky move considering I was also banging her at the time, but I didn’t have anything invested with her and with women it’s a lot easier to win when you have nothing to lose. When the rest of these girls friends found out that I had banged both of them it was GAME ON. I had two or three of them throwing themselves at me after that.

With the second chick it was a similar situation, but I hadn’t had sex with the orbiter. We messed around but since she was fucking my friend she wouldn’t let me hit it. The fact that her 20 yr old friend knew that she was in no position to claim me probably went a long way toward facilitating that hookup. Once again, from that night on the dynamic was different. I took a step which showed unequivocally that I was going to fuck whoever I want, and it not only put the orbiters in their place but it also made me more attractive to all of the other women in the group.

“There is no friend zone – there is only the limbo between you being fooled that a girl is actually a friend on an equitable level to your same sex friends…”

– So are you saying that a woman cannot treat a guy friend of hers like she could a female friend provided she wasn’t attracted to him? This quote: “Women have boyfriends and girlfriends. If you’re not fucking her, you’re her girlfriend” is a myth? I mean it does seem to confirm my observation that guy friends of women are mostly beta orbiters but I always suspected that this might not always be the case.

I ask this from the theoretical, because I never once had a female friend or ever been LBFJed. I do sometimes find myself jealous though of the kind of friendships females have with one another; the emotional bonds they are able to create. I don’t get too emotional around my guy friends for the obvious reason of appearing gay and even before game I intuitively understood the wisdom of being emotionally distant from girls I was pursuing sexually. Sometimes I would find myself frustrated at the lack of emotional support I would receive from my guy friends and wonder if it wouldn’t be so bad to have some platonic female friends. So can a guy only receive such feminine affection/support from his mother, sister, or wife/girlfriend and not from a platonic female friend?

1. Wingmen are retarded. Female or male.
2. Harems and female social circles are more work than necessary. If you want to bang, just hit the streets and pull. Screw all that girl talk. It will drive you insane.

I’ve never had any desire to have a friendship with a female. Being around girls you’re only friends with gets old very fast. Honestly, after 45 minutes I want to bounce. Their rhythm is just so slooowwwww. When I’m with my boys we are fast-paced. Constant jokes, moving from place to place, quick subject changes, reckless driving. With women it takes forever for them to even park their car and gather their shit inside their purse. I’m just not compatible.

Listen, I feel your pain. I too, am a very emotional person, and sometimes it frustrates not being able to connect with guys. So I looked for girls to connect with them and tell my stories. But guess what? Each and every time I spilled my soul at them -not looking for sex or anything- I instinctively felt them recoil. I could practically read on their faces, “You’re a MAN, stop with this bullshit. Make me laugh, cry, want to sex you up, but DON’T MAKE ME YOUR MOTHER!”

So I stopped. Nowadays I deal with my emotions by myself, or with my father, or with my guy friends, or, if shit’s really getting difficult, with my mom. In short, I don’t talk about emotions with girls.

I have limited experience, but I think girls don’t like it when you take them up as “therapists” or people with whom to talk about feelings. I feel as if they lose respect for you, and I think it annoys them because in their entitlement, they see you as a medium through which they can satisfy their needs, and being on the opposite side of this agreement fucks them up somewhat.

In my opinion, women are more selfish than men. At least in the US. Not only that, they are terrible problem solvers. Horrific!

I think your fellow men will be better for sharing your feelings with. Not only are they more sympathetic, they understand you as a man and think logically.

With chicks, they are going to give you some of the weirdest explanations and advice, and then they start to contradict themselves and then they change their stories, on and on. Before you know it your head is spinning and you don’t know which way is up! I once listened to a chick I knew explain her getting pregnant with a bastard child. What she said made zero sense! It was all emotional nonsense.

When I speak of female friends I am not talking about someone you sit down and share a good cry with. No, no….just NO! I am talking about chicks you go out and have a good time with. You can’t show emotional weakness with ANY female without negative repercussions. Get used to the idea that as a man you have to live up to masculine expectations. It seems cruel that you can’t even confide in a platonic female friend about your problems and feelings, but I can assure you that it will come back to bite you in the ass one way or another.

Yes exactly, being a man is a lonely job. I guess the idea of a confidante is probably a myth for all but the most powerful of men; by whom a display of vulnerability might actually be endearing to women.

I once lived in a squat in Barcelona for a while. It was mixed sexes and the people there were very close to each other. Bonding under the shared experiences and responsibilities and risks. There were sexual relationships formed too but also friendships, including between men and women. It seemed very natural. I guess that as an environment it is quite a ‘tribal’ one. How do you think men and women who aren’t in a sexual relationship but belong to the same tribe get along, in say a primitive hunter-gatherer environment? I would guess in a similar way. It is like an extension of the family. And in the best case that is how intergender friendships are, like brother and sister, cousins, niece and uncle or nephew and aunt. Rare but they do happen.

Am I correct in guessing you either don’t have sisters or don’t get along with them?

If that was directed at me, yes, I have two sisters and I get along with them fine.

Family is different. I still wouldn’t get too misty eyed around them but the important thing is to avoid getting emotional around women outside your family. Women only tolerate weakness in a man in measured doses and only after sufficiently high value has been established. The higher your value, the more you can get away with but most of us aren’t rock stars so it’s best to dole out that kind of stuff only when you need to make yourself seem more obtainable.

Women lose respect for a man who shows more than a little weakness and due to the nature of social proof that negative capital does as much damage as positive social proof capital can help you. It’s a double edge sword that you better be damn sure is working for you and not against you.

I have a handful of female orbiters (who provide nothing beyond vagdrama) but I also have one genuine female friend. There’s little sexual tension between us, but like Julian mentioned, it’s more of a consanguineal thing. he does plug the gaps in a way my male friends cannot. I can let my guard down (but not too much) and walk away feeling less caustic and cynical. Very caring, kindergarten teacher type of girl. If I had to describe it, it wouldn’t be dissimilar to the relationship between a Plover bird and a crocodile. We each have our shit down, come together and then casually part ways. And if you think I’m veering towards beta pedalization, it’s because at the time of my father’s death, my cunt of an ex- GF couldn’t bear the fact that my emotions had to take precedence over hers. When she sensed that I was out of frame, she literally had a look of detached repulsion on her face. Plover Bird, on the other hand, came round my place at 7am uninvited with a pre-prepared breakfast and just stayed nearby. She did that for about two weeks. Helped me a lot more than that BS identikit advice women give in every fucking situation, regardless of the topic.

“Oh, it’ll be better in time.”
“Things happen for a reason”
“It’s not the end of the world.”
“Try harder and you’ll be fine.”

I wouldn’t say most intergender friendships are like ours, however. Don’t take this as an endorsements because it’s actually quite the opposite. Most IGFs consist of a pining beta and a clueless/clued-up girl. Or the less common dilemma; a pining fat chick and her decent beta friend. 95% of IGFs are shams: the equivalent of an all-expenses paid trip for the female ego. Proceed with caution, or better yet, don’t proceed at all.

they’re all aware of the LJBF beta orbiter provisioning dynamic and don’t see a problem in it, while simultaenously those betas who got LJBF’ed still believe in their truest intentions and understanding them better and all that shit. it really disgusts me.

I know you wrote this long ago, but it’s interesting. My pastor was talking about how you’re not supposed to touch until marriage (including sideways hugs, but he’s an extremist). I asked how one differentiates between someone they’re dating and someone who is just a friend and he was horrified and said that women and men should never be friends. Obviously, I disagree. I have used the LJBF line myself and it wasn’t to be a bitch at all. I truly wanted to let the guy down easy (it would be bitchy to say “I don’t want to have sex with you and I never will”) and I did like a lot about him (many of the guys anyway). I think the difference that in all those situations, I was going INTO it just wanting to be friends, I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend/FWB. That was all I intended. I genuinely felt bad I had led the guy on by accident. That’s the hard part, when someone wants more and you … don’t. It ruins a potential friendship. It would be interesting to figure out HOW to be just friends and to keep it that way.

Best type of female friend is one that you’ve slept with a couple of times, then told (overtly or covertly) that you’d rather be friends, and actually be friends. Anytime she mentions you to her friends, they’ll always ask her what her relationship with you is, and she will say (almost always covertly) that you slept together but didnt want to be in a relationship – and her friends will see you as an alpha.

“Get it out of your head now that you’re even in a so called “friend zone” with any woman. There is no friend zone – there is only the limbo between you being fooled that a girl is actually a friend on an equitable level to your same sex friends, and you understanding that as soon as she becomes intimate with another guy your attentions will become a liability to any relationship she might want to have with the new sexual interest and she puts you off, or you do the same when you become so involved with another girl.”